Daily Archives: January 10, 2009

Little nuclear TRIGAs

(Pardon me for back-to-back promotions of VY diaries but BP has another good one. Dems take note what’s going on down here and Wall Street! – promoted by Christian Avard)

 The business world this week is declaring longer term growth for Entergy “muted” due to market conditions and questions about nuclear power’s future. As Ed’s two Entergy Yankee diaries show, new large nuke construction is on hold, with the old ones future’s in trouble. These events show current size nuclear power plants becoming  dinosaurs financially as well as in the engineering sense. But strangely a new nuke may be emerging, a greatly downsized unit. Generating 25 megawatts (VY is 620 megawatts ) on, or close to where the need is these micro plants are being marketed as a clean replacement for high greenhouse gas emission generating sources. The engineering of these plants is different from the giant versions but the sales pitch sounds ominously similar. It isn’t quite power-too-cheap-to-meter but it could drift into that sales pitch territory.

They are styled on a small reactor built and used by students of nuclear power ,23 are in operation today.Known as Training, Research, Isotopes,General, Atomics or TRIGA they use a different kind of fuel. It is said they are deigned to make a meltdown virtually impossible. In other words no containment buildings are needed. By the way aren’t the large nuclear generating plants also designed to make meltdowns virtually impossible? The entire apparatus is tamper proof and factory sealed before shipping. We hardly have the capacity to monitor the smattering of large nuclear plants in operation now, it is doubtful the same regulatory agencies could cope with thousand of little nukes shipped, scattered and operating through out the land. “All of our units will have remote sensors on them and they’re all monitored around the clock. And there’s on-site monitoring as well. We will know what’s going on with every one of those units at all times,” a spokesman maintains. ……………Thousands of TRIGAs out and about .

More below the fold.

Hyperion Power Generation Inc. has developed a garden shed-sized nuclear reactor that can produce enough heat to generate 25 megawatts of electricity for up to 10 years.That’s enough energy to power 20,000 homes, but still tiny by current nuclear standards. Hyperion, which calls its reactor as a “nuclear battery,” licensed the technology from the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. It plans to sell the reactor for about $30 million (U.S.) and says there’s potential to sell 4,000 of them around the world by 2025. The company already claims more than $2 billion worth of orders in the pipeline and more than 100 “firm” orders.

TRIGA reactors use low-enriched uranium hydride as a fuel, which can’t be used to make a bomb, and they’re designed to make a meltdown virtually impossible. In other words, no containment building is required.”The secret of the fuel is that it cools itself off,” says a spokesman When uranium hydride gets too hot, above 550 degrees Celsius, it will shed hydrogen atoms. The hydrogen flows out of the core and is stored in special storage trays within the reactor. As the fuel loses hydrogen atoms it begins to naturally cool. As it cools, it will retrieve the hydrogen atoms from the trays.The whole process is self-limiting. A runaway chain reaction isn’t possible – at least that’s what the company claims. The company compares the reactor to lungs that inhale and exhale hydrogen in a natural balance that keeps the reactor at a fairly constant temperature.

http://www.thestar.com/Busines…

http://www.hyperionpowergenera…

Saturday morning headspin …

or circles make me dizzy and nauseous.

All quotes come from this story: Rubin Leaving Citigroup; Smith Barney for Sale, NY Times, 01/09/09.

The new chapter of wrenching change came as former Treasury Secretary Robert E. Rubin, who came under fire for his strong support of that model [you know … the model that resulted in Madoff and tranched mortgage backed financial intruments that deliberately hid a lot of bad loans … that sort of thing] in an advisory role that helped fuel the bank’s troubles, said he would resign.

Yupper dupper …

For Mr. Rubin, his resignation is a sobering turn in a sterling career in Washington and on Wall Street. Since joining Citigroup in 1999 as an adviser to the bank’s senior executives, Mr. Rubin, 70, who is an economic adviser on the transition team of President-elect Barack Obama, has sat atop a bank that has made one misstep after another.

Mr. Rubin began backing away from his senior advisory role last summer when he started counseling Mr. Obama, according to several Citigroup executives who have spoken to him recently. Still, he held discussions with Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. as Citigroup negotiators orchestrated the bank’s bailout in late November. The government injected more than $45 billion into Citigroup and agreed to guarantee about $269 billion of illiquid mortgage-related assets.

What isn’t mentioned in the NY Times article is: prior to being financial advisor and then Secretary of the Treasury for Clinton, advisor/temp chair for Citigroup, and new found financial guru for Obama; Rubin spent some 25 years rising through the corporate ranks at Goldman Sachs.

Regrets? Guess he’s had a few …

“My great regret,” he added, “is that I and so many of us who have been involved in this industry for so long did not recognize the serious possibility of the extreme circumstances that the financial system faces today.”

… but then again, too few to change him (apologies to Frank Sinatra).

Obama, why didn’t you just bring Greenscamspan into your administration-to-be instead of just channeling him via one of his acolytes?

Ahh yes … “change” we can believe in.

Entergy says No New Nukes

(What a week this has been for Vermont Yankee! – promoted by Christian Avard)

Entergy last year filed for permission to begin construction on two new reactors, one each in Louisiana and Mississippi. Today Entergy announced  it’s giving up on these plans. No new nukes for Entergy, at least for now.

*** And Entergy stocks go from “hold” to “sell.” Check it out. http://greenmountaindaily.com/showDiary.do?diaryId=3848 – Christian

“… we have not been able to come to mutually agreeable terms and conditions with GEH for the potential deployment of an ESBWR,” Hinnenkamp said.

http://uk.reuters.com/article/…

Entergy Nuclear says they’d still like to build some kind of new nuke (after all, you can’t run the old ones forever). But these two reactor sites are in states with Public Utility Commissions, who regulate the prices Entergy can charge. Entergy’s in trouble with the MS AG already for Enron-like illegal price manipulation. AG Hood released documents showing

Entergy’s parent company sold Entergy Mississippi electricity at $26 per 1,000 kilowatt hours that it bought on the open market for $12 per 1,000 kilowatt hours.

Entergy denies the charges.

http://www.forbes.com/feeds/ap…

Can’t get funding from the banks, can’t get it from electric rates–only thing left is Obama’s stimulus plan.

http://www.usnews.com/articles…

It looks like GE Hitachi’s Economic Simplified Boiling Water Reactor (ESBWR) design is in trouble, too. And so the unit cost on these early ones is skyrocketing while electricity usage and prices drop.